True Puts Analytics into the Hands of Business Users to Power Data-Driven Decisions
Integrates 100 data sources to create actionable insights
Sales managers can now help agents improve results by sharing effective techniques from high performers
Strict data security, governance and access controls built in
True Corporation is a market-leading telecommunications and digital services provider in Thailand providing a suite of mobile, internet, television, fixed line and bundled services. They employ over 20,000 staff across sales and marketing, customer service, engineering, and operations.
True’s vision is to be Thailand’s leading digital infrastructure provider with services that bring together people, organizations, economies, and societies.
While the rise of connected technologies, mobile devices, and cloud software has made telecommunications more powerful, it has also created an explosion in data. Songwit Techarachan, Head of Data Platform at True, understands both the challenge and opportunity of embracing data analytics across the business to remain competitive, agile, and innovative.
Today we have access to more data than ever, so the critical challenge is how to interpret, analyze, and sort this data into usable insights. In my role, I encourage everyone in the organization to take an active interest in how data can be used to improve the efficiency of their department.
With a strategic goal to become a more data-driven business, True deployed Tableau’s business intelligence and analytics software.
The first step was streamlining telesales
To start, True rolled out a small data analytics project in their telesales department to create near real-time reports to monitor agents’ sales performance.
“Using Tableau, we quickly created a dashboard that showed us at-a-glance products sold, revenue and how agents were tracking to achieve their sales targets. This is very helpful to motivate sales people, but even more importantly it enables sales managers to monitor and optimize the performance of their staff individually and as a group.”
Equipped with the latest analysis and comparisons, sales managers can now help agents improve results by sharing effective techniques from high performers.
The broader benefits were immediately clear
Following the success of the telesales project, other senior executives were keen to roll out the platform to benefit from these learnings and data analytics capabilities.
While a number of departments had started to build their own analytics dashboards outside of Tableau, adoption was slow. The challenge was that they needed specialist skills to write custom code and structured query language (SQL), which made their reports complex and expensive to create, explains Techarachan.
“The reason that Tableau has been embraced by managers and users so fast is that it is easy to use and access on any device.”
For example, True’s corporate planning and sales teams present a daily performance snapshot report to executives, which they had attempted to do using custom-coded dashboards.
Before Tableau, designing, coding, and editing dashboards for executive reporting would take up to a week to develop from start to finish. Ongoing changes and edits were also slow. Today, using Tableau’s user-friendly tools and templates, they can create new dashboards in an hour and easily make changes in minutes.
As a result, True’s executives have the up-to-date analytics they need to make fast, informed decisions. Plus, staff are not wasting time coding up reports and can invest their time on more valuable tasks like strategic planning and serving customers.
Self-service flexibility without compromising security
In his role as Head of Data Platform, Techarachan must balance usability with security.
“There are significant benefits of self-service analytics, but it is essential that we maintain strict levels of data quality, integrity, governance, and security with sensitive data. For example, financial and personally identifiable information (PII), needs to be kept strictly confidential,” said Techarachan.
True is protected by Tableau’s enterprise-grade security including trusted authentication and access controls to manage users’ login rights and permission filters down to row level security (RLS) to define who can access or download data.
On top of this, Tableau removes the need to share files and information via email between users and departments, a process which causes issues for data consistency, version control and security, adds Techarachan.
For example, sales can share validated data feeds with the commercial division to use in their own dashboards, reports and forecasts. Each department can determine precisely which data set is accessible, and dashboards can be refreshed to automatically display the latest figures, direct from the source.
This synchronization eliminates time-consuming manual data entry, out-of-date reports and human error.
Championing data use across technology and business
A major benefit of Tableau is that business users no longer need to rely on the IT department to develop dashboards, which makes it easier for them to build exactly what they want.
Plus, the technical team doesn’t waste time coding reporting dashboards, which gives them more time to work on products and customer support. Everyone can focus on what they are good at.
“We are now championing the use of data across the business by running training to enable self-service analytics and encourage the adoption of Tableau across more departments and applications,” says Techarachan.
“With the help of Tableau, we integrate data from more than 100 sources across the business and we can relate or link information from one source to another to build the insights we need.”
As more team members and executives create and share Tableau dashboards, more business units are discovering the power of the platform.
This all helps to position True as a data-driven business equipped to thrive in a fast-changing telecommunications market.